Reviews

Walk the Blue Fields is Claire Keegan’s second collection of short stories following on from Antarctica, which was published in 1999.

This collection has seven stories, all set in rural Ireland, which lends them a classic, timeless quality. There is little mention of modernity encroaching on anyone’s lives, so it’s hard to tell if they are set in this century, last century or even earlier. References to priests and farming abound, but there’s the sense that Keegan is aware of these Irish tropes and stereotypes and simply wants to lean into them.

All the stories are written in that beautiful clear-eyed prose for which Keegan is known. She even goes so far as to acknowledge the debt she owes to the late great (and my personal favourite) Irish writer John McGahern, who has inspired her style, by dedicating one of the stories, “Surrender (after McGahern)”, to him.

But the centrepiece of the collection is “The Forester’s Daughter”, which was reissued as a single-volume 80-page paperback in 2019. It tells the story of an unfulfilling marriage between a forester (Victor Deegan) who is up to his eyeballs in debt and a woman (Martha Dunne) he met at a dance who married him — after a year-long courtship — on the basis she didn’t think she’d get a better offer.

In “Night of the Quicken Trees”, Keegan turns her eye to folklore and superstition. Another story about a strange partnership between a man and a woman, it charts a “marriage of convenience” between two lonely people, Margaret, a healer, and Stack, an eccentric widower who sleeps with his pet goat Josephine.

I can’t say I fell in love with this collection as much as her earlier one. Not all the stories have remained with me, even though just a week has passed since I read them, and a couple end too abruptly, almost as if Keegan was told to put her pen down or else. But the trio of stories I have singled out are astonishing in their quiet, almost maudlin beauty.

For a more detailed review, please visit my blog.

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